Posts about lsr

German publishers warring with Google — and the link and the internet — have now completed their humiliation at their own hands, capitulating to Google and allowing it to continue quoting and linking to them. How big of them.

The pathetic sequence of their fight:

1. German publishers under the banner of a so-called trade group called VG Media and led by conservative publisher Axel Springer called in who knows what political chits to get legislators to create a new, ancillary copyright law — the Leistungsschutzrecht — to forbid Google et al from quoting even snippets to link to them.

2. In negotiations in the legislature, snippets were then allowed.

3. The publishers went after Google anyway, contending that Google should pay them 11 percent of revenue over the use of snippets.

4. Google, being sued over the use of the snippets, said it would take down the snippets from those publishers this week.

5. The publishers said that for Google to take down the snippets they were using to blackmail Google amounted to Google blackmailing the publishers. And you thought Germans were logical.

6. The publishers went to the government cartel office to complain that Google was using its market power against them.

7. Officials laughed the publishers out of the cartel office.

8. Now the publishers have said that Google can use its snippets for free while this legal matter is being ironed out.

Of course, the publishers never wanted the snippets taken down because they depend on those snippets and links for the audience Google sends to them … for free. It is all their cynical game to try to disadvantage their new and smarter competitor. Those who can, compete. Those who can’t, use their political clout.

Enough. Genug.

I have written a much longer essay about the damage these German publishers are doing to Germany’s standing that I am trying to place in a print publication — so I can speak to the print people. I’ll link to it when that happens. Here’s the lede:

I worry about Germany and technology. I fear that protectionism from institutions that have been threatened by the internet — mainly media giants and government — and the perception of a rising tide of technopanic in the culture will lead to bad law, unnecessary regulation, dangerous precedents, and a hostile environment that will make technologists, investors, and partners wary of investing and working in Germany.

LATER: Ah, there’s another chapter already.

9. Like Japanese soldiers stuck on an island thinking the war continues, Axel Springer has declared that Google must take down snippets from four of its brands: Die Welt, and the auto, sport, and computer subbrands of Bild. Note well that they didn’t do that with superbrand Bild, their largest newspaper and the largest in Germany. They need the eggs. So as it loses its argument that Google is a cartel, the German publishers’ cartel crumbles.

German publishers are not just fighting Google. They are fighting the link and thus the essence of the internet.

Half the major publishers in Germany have started a process of arbitration — which, no doubt, will lead to suits — to demand that Google pay them for quoting from and thus linking to their content. And now we know how much they think they deserve: 11% of Google’s revenue related to their snippets. From their government filing, they want a cut of “gross sales, including foreign sales” that come “directly and indirectly from making excerpts from online newspapers and magazines public.” [All these links are in German.]

Their demands are as absurd as they are cynical and dangerous. First, of course, Google is sending the publishers plenty of value as well. That is, Google is sending the publishers us: readers, customers, the public these news organizations allegedly want to serve. So what are we, chopped liver? I’ll be posting an essay soon that argues that one reason media have a problem building new digital business models is that we still think value is intrinsic only in content; we have no marketplace and metrics for valuing the creation of an audience for it (now that those functions are unbundled). If the publishers really want a fair exchange of value, then they should also be paying Google for the links — the readers — it sends their way. But, of course, that would create a moral hazard and corrupt search; that Google does not charge for placement in search and Google News is precisely what set it apart from predecessors and built a valuable and trusted service.

Google is never going to pay for the right to quote and link to content. That would ruin not only its business but also the infrastructure of knowledge online. If we can find only the knowledge that pays to be found, then the net turns into … oh, I don’t know, a newsstand?

The publishers aren’t stupid. They realize these facts. That’s what makes their action so cynical. They are trying to blackmail net companies in hopes of getting some payoff from them. They’re not just going after Google but also Microsoft and Yahoo — though, interestingly, if a company has only a search engine, the publishers would charge them only a third of their tariff. That is to say, they want to go after the big net companies because they are big targets.

Earlier this month, I spoke at a Google Big Tent event in Berlin (Google paid my travel expenses; I do not accept other payment from Google) where a conservative member of parliament, Dorothee Bär, had the admirable guts to criticize these mostly conservative publishers for their efforts, telling them that she opposed passage of the law that is allowing this nonsense — a Leistungschutzrecht or ancillary copyright — and also warning them that a failing business model is no excuse to run to government begging for regulation. You’d think conservatives would agree about that. But that, again, is what makes the publishers’ campaign so cynical.

Note, by the way, that Google does not place advertising on Google News. Are the publishers seeking 11% of 0? Note as well that there is data to say that longer samples of content could end up sending *more* traffic to creators (more on that, too, in a later post). These are facts that will need to be discussed in any suits.

Add all this to other attacks on Google by German media and politics against Google: the Verpixelungsrecht — right to be pixelated — in Google Street View and calls by German politicians to break up Google. Add to that as well the recent European court decision upholding a right to be forgotten and requiring Google to take down links to content that subjects don’t like.

And I worry about the net. I worry about Europe and especially Germany about their efforts to protect the past. I’ll likely write more about that as well later.

But, of course, these warriors do not speak for all of Germany or all of Europe. The instigators of the war include Axel Springer, Burda, WAZ, the Müncher Merkur, and others. But other major publishers — Spiegel Online, Handelsblatt.com, FAZ.net, Stern.de, Sueddeutsche.de and [cough] the new German edition of Huffington Post — have not joined the war. And there are politicians such as Bär and outgoing vice president of the European Commission Neelie Kroes who have the courage to defend the future. Here is Kroes the other day responding to strikes across Europe protesting the arrival of Über:

The debate about taxi apps is really a debate about the wider sharing economy. That debate forces us to think about the disruptive effects of digital technology and the need for entrepreneurs in our society. . . .

Whether it is about cabs, accommodation, music, flights, the news or whatever. The fact is that digital technology is changing many aspects of our lives. We cannot address these challenges by ignoring them, by going on strike, or by trying to ban these innovations out of existence. . . .

I believe it is a fundamental truth that Europe needs more entrepreneurs: people who will shake and wake us and create jobs and growth in the process.

We also need services that are designed around consumers. The old way of creating services and regulations around producers doesn’t work anymore. They must have a voice, but if you design systems around producers it means more rules and laws (that people say they don’t want) and those laws become quickly out of date, and privilege the groups that were the best political lobbyists when the law was written.

That is old-fashioned compared to a system that helps all of us as consumers, and encourages entrepreneurs. We need both those elements in our economy; otherwise we will be outpaced to our East and our West. We’ll be known as the place that used to be the future, but instead has become the world’s tourism playground and nursing home. I don’t want Europe to have that future. . . .

More generally, the job of the law is not to lie to you and tell you that everything will always be comfortable or that tomorrow will be the same as today. It won’t. Not only that, it will be worse for you and your children if we pretend we don’t have to change. If we don’t think together about how to benefit from these changes and these new technologies, we will all suffer. . . .

Germany, I fear, is not the land of innovation. It is a land of institutions.

This week the German Bundestag passed a law created by publishers — primarily Axel Springer and Burda — to force internet companies — read: Google — to pay for quoting — and thus promoting and linking to — their content. The legislation, the Leistungsschutzrecht, was known as the Google tax.

In the end, compromise legislation exempts precisely what the publishers had been going after: snippets of text of the sort that search engines quote. The bill now generously says that single words or very few words — it is not precise in its definition — remain free. But of course that exception only proves the absurdity of the effort: Who could ever own a word or a phrase? Or a thought?

So now, if the bill passes the next house of the legislature, lawyers will make a fortune debating how short is too long. No matter the length, speech suffers. Don’t the publishers see that they live by the quote? Their content is made up of what other people say. Their content gains influence when other people quote it.

But that is beside their point. They want to tax Google. They say it is not fair — imagine a kindergartener stomping his little feet — that Google makes money as they lose money. They think they deserve a share, though the truth is that their content makes up very little of what people search for. And, besides, every time Google links to them it is up to the publishers to establish a relationship with that user and find value in it. That publishers have failed to do this almost two decades into the web era is not Google’s fault; it is their fault. Rather than innovating and finding the necessary opportunity in their disruption, these publishers — conservatives who otherwise would diminish government — go running to the Chancellor and her party to pass their Leistungsschutzrecht.

To be fair, this is not purely a German disease. It is a European ailment as well. In France publishers hide behind government’s skirt to blackmail Google into paying into a fund to support innovation by publishers who’ve not innovated. The French government is also looking at taxing the gathering of big data — a tax, then, on knowledge. Belgian publishers rejected Google’s links and then thought better of it and finally extorted Google into advertising in their publications to avoid that nation’s version of a Leistungsschutzrecht. The internet causes a certain insanity the world around. In the U.S., we had SOPA and PIPA, laws like the Leistungsschutzrecht meant to protect ailing industries — though they were defeated. Then there is ACTA, an international attempt to protect the copyright industry.

But there are more issues in Germany. It is leading the privacy technopanic in Europe. Government leaders have urged citizens to have pictures taken from public places of public views of the facades of buildings blurred in Google Street View; they label this their Verpixelungsrecht. A privacy extremist in one state in Germany has tried to outlaw Facebook’s “like” button. That same state tried to overrule Facebook’s requirement to use real names.

And another: In entrepreneurial circles, Germany is known as the land of internet copycats. Again and again, German entrepreneurs have copied American services and business models, though their real business model is to get bought by the American originals.

Mind you, I love Germany (though to many Americans, that seems like an odd statement). There’s nowhere I’d rather visit. I have many friends there. I have met many talented technologists there. I marvel at its book culture and at its lively — if also suffering — market for serious journalism.

But today I worry about Germany. It is an industrial wonder in a postindustrial age. Government and media are embracing each other to defend their old institutions against disruption and the opportunity that can come with it. As I wrote in my book Public Parts, I’m concerned that Germans’ will to be private, not to fail, and especially not to fail publicly put them at a disadvantage in an entrepreneurial age when failure is a necessary product of experimentation. I fear that entrepreneurs, investors, and internet companies will shy away from Germany’s borders given the hostility that is shown especially to American internet companies.

I am disappointed that the land of Gutenberg, the land that invented the ability to share knowledge and ideas at a mass scale and to empower speech is now haggling over the control and ownership of a few words. As they say in German, schade. What a shame.

[This post has been translated into German and adapted as an op-ed at Zeit Online here.]

Related: I respond to Albert Wenger, a wise and German VC, regarding the #LSR here: http://disq.us/8cfp8h

At long last, Google is standing up to fight the ridiculous ancillary copyright (Leistungschutzrecht) bill heading to law in Germany, a law that would require Google and others — you? — to pay publishers to quote them, to link to them (to benefit them).

On a site called “Defend Your Net,” this video shows a wealth of searches and answers and at the end says (my translation):
“For more than 10 years, anytime you want, you can find what moves you. A planned law will now change that. Do you want that? Take action. Defend your net. Continue to find what you seek.”

More information about the bill (in German) says it will hurt the German economy, threaten diversity of information, cause legal uncertainty (for bloggers, too), and cause a setback for innovative media. The paradox, Google says, is that publishers can pull their content off Google search — and lose the many clicks it sends their way — whenever they want.

This is a horrid collusion of two institutions — media and government — threatened by the disruption of technology.
I’ve been shouting about this travesty. I’m glad Google is finally — if tardily — making its voice heard.